Hunters
by marastar
Summary: A McNat ficlette, set sometime after the Angel Square kiss. The angsty ramblings of two people who just need to admit that they're obsessed with each other.


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Hunters

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Does anybody think I actually own these characters? No? Okay then.

Summary: A McNat ficlette, set sometime after the Angel Square kiss. The angsty ramblings of two people who just need to admit that they're obsessed with each other.

Note: Italicized text taken from the OLTL April 9, 2003 transcript. Copyrighted by ABC.

* * *

Angel Square

Midnight

I want to bring you closer to heaven forever

Meet an angel and you'll know what to do

She stares at the paper in her hand. It's crumpled and barely legible, but still intact. And from the touch of the paper between her fingers, she is almost there again, that feeling as she read it for the first time.

Click your heels three times and you'll know where to go next

Home. She touches her lips. They are swollen, raw.

The lips of a temptress. The mouth of a woman without a soul, as Carlotta would probably say, her husband not yet dead a year.

They are punished for what they desire. For what is forbidden.

And she remembers. Remembers how she kissed him goodbye, here, under the angel. Cris' angel.

She is almost afraid to look up, to see her husband's eyes through its blank gaze, the cracks in the weather-beaten stone. Staring at her. Crushing her.

All she wanted was to break through. To have John reach in and clutch her heart. To realize that it was his for the taking, that he had nothing to fear.

She knew he would. She knew he wasn't as cold as he pretended. But she wanted to force it. Demand that he admit how much he wanted her. That he felt the same fire when she touched him. That they couldn't be denied.

And she did, beneath the gaze of her husband's angel. She took what she wanted, and now there is nothing left to give.

* * *

He is still unable to breathe.

He tries deep breaths. He tries sitting on the bed, one arm behind his head. He closes his eyes to focus. He listens to his heart beating. He tries to think of ice and cold showers, realizing too late his palm is bruised from bitten-down nails pressing into flesh.

But he can't stop thinking of her. Of the way she turned to him, smiled at him. The way it wrapped around his heart and made him ache with want.

She is so guarded, so protective of her scars. Of those who came before him and left their mark. But in her smile, that brilliant flash of light, she gives everything away.

And he loves that about her.

Loves. He turns over and looks at the frame on the table. Him and Caitlyn in a gilded frame. Happier times, days when there were no dark clouds.

He'd worshipped her. She had been everything he wasn't; open, nurturing, giving. Innocent.

She'd just started teaching public school, passing up Princeton against her father's wishes. They'd gotten through the roughest patch, finally; her parents had started calling again, during Sunday dinner they called him John after months of enduring the third person pronouns. Their daughter's working class cop was tolerated in the Fitzgerald home, though talk of the engagement was still off-limits. Still groundless hopes that she would come to her senses, and marry the young partner in the firm.

Yet, in spite of it all, things were getting better. He thought his life was complete, an angel by his side. She'd redeemed him, needed him. He felt like a giant in her eyes.

But there is nothing angelic about him when Natalie is in his arms. There is no peace. It is something primal and dark, hidden. Something denied far too long, bound and gagged inside him. Yet it is screaming, pleading, clawing its way out.

She looks at him with those haunted blue eyes and it's like a knife through his heart. She sees everything he wants from her, every dirty thing. Then she laughs, tosses back that red hair of hers, and he knows she wants it too. Knows that she sees right through him, where their lines of pain and regret intersect, where his darkest thoughts lie, pushed into a corner with all his bad deeds.

And suddenly, he feels he can breathe again. Like he is alive.

But she doesn't need him. She won't fall if he doesn't meet her halfway, if he refuses to let her see how much he is beginning to need her. How he looks in those eyes and sees his own pain lying there, like a mirror to his mind, the eternal sleepless night that's been his life, begging for dawn to emerge from the dark.

There is a strength to her. Something that doesn't come from deflecting the hurt, from sharpening the survival skills of dismissal and lies.

She tends to her wounds; her life growing up in AC, a drunk for a mother, bouncing from shithole to shithole, one step ahead of the slumlords and loan sharks, falling between the cracks of the boardwalk. He still sees the pain she carries knowing the life she will never have within the Buchanan fortress, built with money and influence, love and power. The loss of a husband he killed.

The scars are there. Beautiful. Undiscovered. They are his territory, and he is a hunter.

Natalie won't crumble if he doesn't come to her. If he doesn't get down on his knees and thanks God for her, for needing her, for wanting her and the damaged goods she thinks she is offering.

But _he_ will.


End file.
